


We've Golden Soil and Wealth For Toil

by yungdreams



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Amputation, Implied/Referenced Sex, M/M, Robbery, Surgery, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-29
Updated: 2016-08-29
Packaged: 2018-08-11 18:10:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7902649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yungdreams/pseuds/yungdreams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Exploits of Junkrat and Roadhog, told from Hog's POV in a pseudo-road-novel style.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We've Golden Soil and Wealth For Toil

**Author's Note:**

> I tried so hard to make this like what I did before for my Widowtracer fic but it ended up way more prosaic. Also, I was aiming for Fear & Loathing and kinda ended up in The Things They Carried.

Mako was a pig farmer before this.

 

They had packed the old Ford pickup with three and a half gallons of distilled water, a spare seven-gallon tank of petrol, about twoscore shells for Mako's old Nitro Express, two weeks or so's supply of radiation pills, sixteen cans of SPAM, a set of camping cookware, a couple of good crowbars, two short-handled trench shovels, Mako's Bowie knife and old mounting hook, Jamie's rusted toolkit, two dozen handmade Bouncing Betties, a pound of SEMTEX, fourteen cased blasting caps, two hundred yards of fuse cable, and a half gallon of sevofluorane nitrous. In the front seat was Jamie's ancient wireless shortwave, with the ashtray filled with salvaged backup batteries, and no seatbelts. 

 

They'd hit two banks and a post office in Mildura, taking anything they could carry and burning the rest. Before that, they'd been driving since Yuendumu. The chopper had died somewhere in the Northern Territory, and they'd given it an omnic's funeral by beating it into scrap, viciously. They'd jacked the Ford from some poor sod of a solar farmer and ransacked a general store. They plowed relentlessly ahead towards New Canberra.

 

Mako was in the Front when the continent got turned inside out.

 

Mako had dragged Jamie, screaming, blood running from his ears and the sickly song of detonation ringing across the flat land. Tying off the bleeding stumps of Jamie's arm and leg with rubber cable. Gagging on the smell of roasted flesh and hair.

 

Jamie's nose still twitched when he worked. He could pick out every bomb's smell like a trained rat. Black powder for mines. Ammonium perchlorate for flashbangs. White phosphorus for antipersonnel cleanup. Nitroglycerin gelignite for the anti-Omnic traps.

 

A pig and a rat. Two good old junkers in a Ford pickup. Walking corpses with nitrous habits.

 

Jamie now had an Omnic's arm and leg. He used to joke that he was becoming one, bit by bit, and that he should keep blowing himself up to see how far along he could get. Mako didn't laugh at this.

 

Mako was in the Front before this. Long nights, hunting and preying on packs of roving Omnics, keeping on the move, snapping at the haunches of the enemy. Victories begot scrapyards. Failures begot graveyards. He used to joke that it was a shame the pigs didn't get fed when nobody in the Front was killed in a raid. Jamie thought this was a riot.

 

Mako liked Jamie. Never was it something that could be put into words. Jamie smelled like a munitions factory, of tensile steel springs, of ball bearings and mercury fuses. He sang the differences between deflagration and detonation, rattling off a hundred different types of explosives construction as he twisted and soldered.

 

Mako made dinner for the two of them, usually. Jamie slept in the cabin of the truck, while Mako preferred the ground. Some nights the two of them spent under the same blanket. On the harsh, rough soil, under the crackling mylar, Mako felt where Jamie's arm ended and where the fat of his belly began.

 

They set off early in the morning before dawn. The light from the dawning sunrise made the strontium dust on the hills and craters shimmer, so they could avoid it more easily.

 

Jamie whistled in the mornings when they took off. Mako had gotten used to it. In the evening, Mako would thump out the haka his dad had taught him years ago on the dashboard. Bit by bit, Jamie had learned it and he would often join in, his metal arm clanking like a ghoulish tamborine.

 

He had cauterized the stump of Jamie's leg with a bundle of smokeless cordite. He would never forget the look on Jamie's face, how he nursed at the nitrous tank like a starving child.

 

He thought of highwaymen with their throats crushed under tires, of spattering blood, of emaciated bodies in the Outback. Mako would never forget what cooking human flesh smelled like, or of the penalties pigs incurred to eat.

 

The sun crowned the horizon, searing white-gold into the sky like the first crack of an atom bomb, of the instant between deflagration and detonation.

Advance Australia fair, whistled Jamie.


End file.
